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• George Daniels (Master...
English watch-maker George Daniels (1926-2011) was most famous for creating the co-axial escarpment and could make a complete watch by hand. In his lifetime, he received many awards, including the rarely-given Gold Medal of the Clockmakers' Company of London. [Listener: Roger Smith; date recorded: 2003]
TRANSCRIPT: Yes well, when my mother was 92, she died at 93, she wrote me a letter and I hadn't heard from her for 20 years or so, and she wrote and apologised for my miserable childhood. I must say I was astonished to get this letter because I didn't know I'd had a miserable childhood, it seemed to me to be quite the opposite. Of course we were very poor and lacked often even the basic requirements, or as we consider to be requirements nowadays. And the diet was very frugal. I mean, for example, it would be bread and dripping for breakfast and a cup of tea and bread and jam for tea and another cup of tea and whatever might be going cheaply available from the local shops for lunch. So it wasn't a very varied diet. And we ate all meals standing round the kitchen table, there were no chairs. The only chairs available were occupied by my father, who made quite certain that he didn't suffer any discomfort. Even his diet was different to ours; he had to be specially catered for.
And I would be sent off in the morning to buy a loaf of bread. One would get a large loaf of bread, stale, for a penny, and I would have to negotiate very heavily trafficked roads to get to this baker's shop. No traffic lights in those days, just motor vehicles, not stopping at junctions. When I got back, the loaf apparently was so stale that my mother in a rage threw it at me and knocked me over. So I was a bit like a ninepin that morning. But during the day I would leave the house and find things to amuse myself with. There was lots going on and lots a workman could do, and I would quite often make money helping the local retailers who had stalls... set their stall up in the high street and I would help, either by carting boxes or helping with the vegetables or generally getting in the way and trying to be useful and make a few pennies like that. For transport, we sat on the rear bumpers of the local busses, and this was a very precarious hold we had on life on that thing. Why we didn't get rolled off and run over, we will never know, but there it was. We travelled up and down on the backs of these busses on the bumpers.